Neo (NEO)
Basics * FKA Antshares (ANS/ANC) * Founded in 2014, open-source on Github since 2015 * Chinese, Developed by Shanghai-based blockchain company ONCHAIN * Decentralized smart contract platform * Not Mineable * NEO is a blockchain project “that utilizes blockchain technology and digital identity to digitize assets, to automate the management of digital assets using smart contracts, and to realize a “smart economy” with a distributed network. * Intended Uses: Asset digitization and trading (digital stock exchange and real estate market for example), business blockchain solutions * “Nest is a whole new form of smart fund written in Antshares smart contracts,” writes NEO about its new ‘DAO’ style fund called Nest Fund, which uses NEO smart contract technology. * Other than its parent, ONCHAIN, NEO leads projects including blockchain-based browsers, a web-based crypto-asset wallet, as well as an online crowdfunding fund that is not the aforementioned Nest. Tokens * Per the rebrand, not only does Antshares become NEO, but Antcoin (ANC) becomes ‘GAS’. “So, it is no longer a ‘dividend interest’ sort of asset, but a utility sub-token for network functionalities. “NEO holders earn GAS at a constant rate based on the amount of NEO owned. GAS generation is finite and gas rewards stop in a few years. GAS rewards are essentially dividend payments for owning NEO. This is because GAS is generated at a predictable rate and NEO holders do not have to do any work to receive GAS. As such, NEO is easily classified as an equity security under securities laws in the US, South Korea, and certain EU countries. This makes it illegal for non-certified exchanges to trade NEO in these countries.” * NEO has a unique structure in that NEO are indivisible and intended to act as shares which give voting rights and pay dividends in the form of GAS which is used for transactions and extra services. * The NEO token is like partial ownership of the NEO platform. NEO token holders are entitled to vote for bookkeepers. NEO’s use as a share in the company rather than a token is furthered by the fact that NEO is non-divisible. NEO is not meant to be transacted with — that’s why there is GAS. * GAS is used for all operations on the NEO network. Now when a company registers or changes assets on the NEO blockchain, they pay in GAS — this GAS is then distributed to all NEO holders. Anyone can claim this GAS by just holding their NEO in a personal wallet. Such as this one: NEON * Bookkeepers are entitled to charge a transaction fee (in GAS) for general transactions on the blockchain that only they (the bookkeepers) receive. However, by decoupling NEO and GAS, there is an incentive to keep transaction fees low; here’s why: High transaction fees, which only benefit the bookkeepers, will prevent people from wanting to register their assets on the blockchain. The less assets registered, the less rewards NEO holders will get. Thus, NEO holders are incentivized to vote in bookkeepers who will keep transaction fees low. * Has announced (6-2019) it will change their fee model in their upcoming NEO3 update. Tech * From this article (6-2019): "Neo has finality in blocks, which practically means: it cannot fork. It has implemented a new iteration of its consensus algorithm, the Byzantine Fault Tolerance mechanism (dBFT 2.0), on its mainnet, according to a press release on June 4. The new algorithm purportedly provides immediate transaction finality. dBFT 2.0 includes a new procedure for reintegrating failed nodes back into the network, and also adds a “commit phase” of consensus, which alleviates forking issues by including a step that forces node assignment to new blocks." * Will have (6-2019) a big change in its protocol called NEO3. This will change their VM (it will decouple from the blockchain), their smart contract structure, their account model, their transaction types (from 9 different types towards only 1), blocksize ("Currently, we add MaxSize for block and block witness (to better prevent spam attacks), and changed the time unit of the block timestamp to milliseconds for IoT use cases.") ''and their fee model. Competition * Often touted as “The Ethereum of China”. While NEO uses Smart Contracts and provides a platform for the creation of Dapps it has an added clear focus on connecting the real world with the digital and supports many common programming languages such as C#, Java and Python. It aims to achieve this by combining legally binding digital certificates of assets with digital identities and smart contracts to create what they call “The Smart Economy”. Concerns * From this big blog post on several red flags on NEO: ''“The price to deploy a smart contract on NEO at this moment is 500 GAS (or $30,000 at $60/GAS). Because it’s so expensive to deploy smart contracts on NEO, there are very few smart contracts on the main net right now. In fact, as of last week, there were only 10 smart contracts. 3 of which are test smart contracts deployed by Erik Zhang. 6 of the rest are cookie cutter ICO smart contracts. There is one smart contract for Hash Puppies, an upcoming game on NEO similar to CryptoKitties." * From this post: "It’s also interesting to note that there are 27 dApps listed on NEO’s website, yet many of them are from a CoZ competition held in November last year that will probably never be deployed on the main net. Each winner of the competition won 1350 GAS but none of them have used it to deploy their smart contract. Would you consider the listing of demo, test net smart contracts as dApps on NEO dishonest? At the very least, it doesn’t increase my confidence in the team.” * Using Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) for its blockchain operations. “Specialized bookkeeping nodes” reach consensus via “delegated voting” per NEO’s dBFT model. It takes a two-thirds vote for approval of a current copy of a blockchain. (see dBFT for more) The disadvantage with this system is a lack of decentralization. In its purest sense, instead of thousands of validators being scattered all across the world, governance is concentrated in a few dozen validators. The majority of these nodes are currently operated by the NEO team. However, as of Quarter 1, 2018, NEO will hold less than 2/3 and will continue to hold fewer as time progresses. Regardless, NEO will never be as decentralized as other pure PoS platforms. * NEO is undergoing a process of decentralizing the location of their validator nodes, but they still maintain full control over the nodes. They are not in a process of decentralizing control, as many would like to think. NEO’s team currently sets the total validator count to be at 7 and they operate all 7 nodes. They have claimed to decentralize the network by placing validator nodes in different locations such as in a Swiss bunker and a Dutch telecommunications company’s (KPN) server farm. However, the NEO’s team still owns and operates these nodes, so it’s decentralization of location but still a centralization of control. * In a blow to the NEO network, major machine learning Dapp Effect.AI has announced its intentions to migrate to EOS following directional concerns; Effect.AI specifically cited the free transactions on NEO leading to overwhelming numbers of malicious attacks; the move is set to happen in April Team, investors, partners, etc. Team * Hongfei, Da; founder & CEO * Zhang, Erik; co-founder & core dev * Xu, Hitters; founder * Wang, Aero; co-founder Investors * Got early funding from Danhua Capital * Is listed as one of the investors in Fortuna (As of 9-2019) Partners * Partners include crowdfunding platform WINGS, e-commerce giant Alibaba and multinational technology corporation Microsoft * With Ali Cloud and ONCHAIN, NEO is working on a proof of existence e-mail repository * KPN voted in as NEO MainNet consensus node to speed up decentralization (this means now as of 12-2018, 1 of the 6 nodes is not from the NEO team and 2 nodes are not of the NEO team on testnet) * "NEO joined (24-9-2019)'' the .NET Foundation, the Microsoft-created, globally leading open-source foundation, during the .NET Conference 2019, as the latter’s first-ever blockchain project."'' Category:Coins/Tokens